Movable Type uses IP-based comment throttling to provide some protection against
comment flooding. ThrottleSeconds sets the number of seconds after which a visitor
has posted a comment that he/she will not be allowed to post another comment.
For example, if Alice posts a comment at 30 seconds after the minute, she will not
be allowed to post another comment from the same IP address for the number of seconds
set in this setting. You can increase this setting if you don't get too many people
commenting often on your weblog.

This setting is also used to determine the amount of time after which an IP address
will be automatically banned from commenting on your weblog. Default value: 20

Example:
ThrottleSeconds 60

I was just thinking the other day that MT could really use some sort of throttle so
comment spambots would not be able to post hundreds of spam comments per hour to a weblog.

User who are upgrading will have to manually add this parameter to their mt.cfg file.

Update: MT-Blacklist version 1.62 is reported to not be compatible with this
parameter (the parameter has no effect if MT-Blacklist is installed). Ben Trott
says
this is because MT-Blacklist overrides the comment posting process, which I take to mean
that the MT code where this parameter was added is bypassed by MT-Blacklist.

Also in 2.66, we've changed the behavior of <$MTCommentAuthorLink$> to use
redirects when linking to URLs given in comments. The goal of this is to defeat the
PageRank boost given to spammers by posting in the comments on a weblog.

I'm not sure if I like this one or not.

Update: Okay, now I like it less. The new comment author URLs do not
validate because the & characters used in the redirected URLs are not encoded.

Update 2: This probably won't be needed for very long, but here's the
fix to make the comment author URLs valid XHTML...

You're welcome, Lisa. At first, it seemed like such a trivial fix and I figured Six Apart would have a patch out sometime tomorrow. When Maddy linked to the forum thread with the patch that fixed something else, I felt it was time to step up to the plate.

My first MT patch!! :) Woo-Hoo!!

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This page contains a single entry by TweezerMan published on January 14, 2004 8:36 PM.